Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Edward James (1907-1984)Lobster Telephone (white aphrodisiac)white Bakelite telephone and white plaster lobsterLength: 12 ½ in. (31.7 cm.)Conceived by Salvador Dalí in 1936; commissioned by Edward James from Green & Abbott in 1938 in an edition of eleven, four red and seven white.ProvenanceMade for Edward James by Green & Abbott in 1938.The Edward James Foundation, West Dean, West Sussex.National Galleries

The National Galleries of Scotland announced Monday that it raised £853,000 ($1.1 million) to buy a white Salvador Dalí “Lobster Telephone” so the iconic sculpture, commissioned by British poet and leading patron of the Surrealist art movement Edward James, could stay in the United Kingdom.

“Lobster Telephone” also known as “Aphrodisiac Telephone,” was sold at a Christie’s auction to an undisclosed foreign buyer, but the U.K. government put an export bar on the artwork, giving NGS time to raise enough money to match the price. The Henry and Sula Walton Fund donated £753,000 ($948,874), with the remainder from an Art Fund (the national fundraising charity for art) grant.

Dalí created 11 lobster telephones for James in the 1930s, all designed with a working rotary dial telephone and a lobster made of plaster. Four were painted red, and seven were painted white. Most are in museums around the world, including a rare version with a red lobster on a black telephone at the Tate Modern in London. One remains in a private collection.

"I do not understand why, when I ask for grilled lobster in a restaurant, I'm never served a cooked telephone,” Dalí a master of many genres including film, all committed to Surrealism, wrote in his 1942 autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí. “I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.” It only gets more surreal from there.

The “Lobster Telephone” acquired by the NGS had been owned by the Edward James Foundation in West Sussex and will go on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

"This major acquisition cements our position as one of the world's greatest collections of Surrealist art," said Simon Groom, director of modern and contemporary art at the NGS. " Dalí created something incredibly rich, imaginative and funny with the most economical of means."

Dalí believed that objects such as the lobster telephones could reveal the secret desires of the unconscious, because lobsters and telephones both possess powerful sexual connotations. The telephone appears in paintings of the late 1930s, including “Mountain Lake” (1938), on display at Tate Liverpool, and in drawings and designs, often signifying erotic pleasure and pain.

For the 1939 New York World's Fair, Dalí created “Dream of Venus, a multimedia experience that involved dressing live nude models in fresh seafood, including a lobster to cover the genitals of his female subjects. Dalí strongly associated food and sex. In “Lobster Telephone,” the tail, which embodies the lobster’s sexual organs, is placed directly over the mouthpiece.

The wildly eccentric and bisexual James was the only son of William James, who had inherited a fortune from his father, merchant Daniel James, and Scots socialite Evelyn Forbes. He had four sisters. Some claim James was fathered by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), but in his memoirs he wrote "I was not, I was, in fact, his grandson," claiming his grandmother who had an affair with the Prince of Wales. It was widely rumored at the time that Forbes was one of the Prince of Wales' mistresses, inspiring an oft-quoted ballad by Hilaire Belloc.

James sponsored Dalí for the full year in 1938, and he amassed the most comprehensive and coveted private collection of Surrealist art. He also supported Dalí for about two years, and allowed René Magritte to stay in his London house to paint. James is a subject of two Magritte paintings.

James’ collection included works by Hieronymus Bosch, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and many others, most of which were sold at Christie's two years after his death. His philosophical passion for Surrealism also manifested in his sponsorship of Minotaure, a lush Surrealist magazine published in Paris.

A multiple-award-winning journalist, I’ve held top editorial roles at The Associated Press and Dow Jones. A former student of literature, studio art and art history with deep working knowledge of finance and business, I explore the global art markets and cultural analysis. ...